The U.S. Energy Department is unprepared to build the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, and presumptuous for requesting funding for the project, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) told Energy Secretary Rick Perry in a congressional hearing this week.
Perry took a blast from the dais while testifying Tuesday on his agency’s fiscal 2019 budget plan before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which has policy but not budget jurisdiction over DOE.
Cortez Masto, like fellow Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and nearly every other elected official from Nevada, opposes bringing in tens of thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste into the state. She noted DOE has neither finalized a design for the proposed repository, nor settled procurement details for critical components of the massive disposal site.
As an example of the latter, Cortez Masto zeroed in on DOE’s lack of funding or procurement strategy for titanium drip trays that would protect waste containers interred under Yucca Mountain from water that might leak into the mountain.
“Why should Congress agree to appropriate any funds without answers to any of these questions?” Cortez Masto asked Perry.
“These dollars are for the licensing side that the NRC’s working on, and for our operational side of it, just to cover the cost of that,” Perry said. “It’s not to be looking at the structural issues.”
On Monday, Cortez Masto sent the DOE chief a letter asking, among other things, whether the agency has spent $10 million in carryover funding — appropriations left over from a prior year — to work on its Yucca license. And, if so, how much. During Tuesday’s hearing, the lawmaker asked Perry to respond to the letter within two weeks. Perry said he would give “as timely a response as possible.”
The Department of Energy is not actually seeking funding to build Yucca as part of its fiscal 2019 budget request. As it did for fiscal 2018, the agency requested $120 million that would mostly go toward administrative tasks to resume licensing of the facility. Specifically, DOE wants centralized management of its Yucca Mountain license application in a new Yucca Mountain and Interim Storage program staffed by equivalent of 83 full-time administrative and legal workers.
These staffers would support DOE’s application to license Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository for civilian and defense nuclear waste, assuming DOE actually gets the funding to resume defense of the license application it filed in 2008 with the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
